Language Log

Since both consist of carefully managed and skillfully manipulated sound, music and language blend into each other.  This is most evident in song, of course, where language and tonality exist simultaneously.  But sometimes the human voice is treated as an instrument, and language recedes into the background.  On the other hand, something else human that is more ostensibly musical, namely whistling, can be used for the communication of ideas and information, tasks that are usually reserved for language.  See the great Wikipedia article on "Whistled language" and the masterful Wikipedia article on "Transcendental whistling", also this YouTube video:

"Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero". (10:20)

Sign on the front of an audiovisual equipment supplier in Pudong, Shanghai:

(Source of photograph)

Fred Pelzman, "The Craziness of ICD-10", MedPage Today 7/2/2015:

At our faculty meeting last week, representatives of the medical college and the hospital came to update us on the changes coming into effect with ICD-10.

The compliance officers went through the changes in regulations — for inpatients and outpatients — which we've all heard before, the changes in the rules, and how ICD-10 leads to greater specificity for billing. Almost to the point of ridiculousness.

Medical websites, articles, and blogs have been full of examples of hilarious insane ICD-10 codes, new ones that many of us will (hopefully) never use in a lifetime of practice. 

If there exists one for fall from nonmilitary spacecraft, does that mean that there are military spacecraft? Are we sending Marines into space?

I'm sure someone has a practice where their patients are frequently coming in after being bitten by Orcas, and it's nice to know there's a code to bill for that if I need it, but all of this leads to a level of mental exhaustion, that we're all being put upon, asked to do something else that adds no real value to our care of patients.

Gábor Ugray took this photo last week outside a Turkish-run Italian restaurant in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a diverse mix between run-down and hip:

In The Opinion Pages section of today's NYT, Contributing Op-Ed Writer Murong Xuecun has a provocative piece entitled "Corrupting the Chinese Language" (5/26/15).

His basic claim is that "Decades of… party blather have washed through a mighty propaganda machine straight into people’s minds and into the Chinese vernacular."  The result is that, because people are conditioned to talk using phrases ready made by the party, they are conditioned to think in ways determined by the highly politicized language in which they have been immersed their entire lives.  Even dissidents are reduced to "using the language of our propagandists, and not ironically."